Win XP keeps booting

[geotrac]

I have an E Machine with 512 RAM 80 G HD that is about 3 years old,running Windows XP Family. It has started rebooting continually. When try to boot it goes to choice of start up saying Win has shut down unexpectedly. Try to boot to in either Safe Mode or Reg Windows, then will go to Windows logo act as though booting, but will then shut down and continue to reboot itself. Will NOT recognize a boot disk in CD-Rom drive and boot from it. Anyone have any suggestions?

[Nenu]

If you havent cleaned inside the PC, give it a good go over.
Parts of your PC might be overheating

[vsboxerboy]

boot from XP install cd and do a disk check?

[DeaconFrost]

Once you boot from the XP install CD, and go into the recovery console, you can try fixboot and fixmbr as well. If all else fails, you can do a full repair install, and then rerun Windows Update.

[geotrac]

This is my daughters PC and she says she didn't get a copy of Windows XP Family with it when she purchased it and didn't make a boot disk for it. I us Windows XP Pro and have tried to boot with my boot disk but it doesn't recognize it, guess will only see Win XP Family boot disk. Will clean inside to see if this helps.

[DeaconFrost]

Do you mean XP Home? If so, you will be limited by the repair options you can do with a Pro disc. If it isn't booting from your XP Pro disc, you should check in the BIOS for the boot order.

[digital_exhaust]

Sounds like heat or hardware to me.

Can you get into the bios? If so, (and I don't know if this is even possible, I'm not very familiar with the eMchine bios) check and see if it shows any tmeps, and check and make sure that the cpu is clocked correctly. If the clocks are off, you may be looking at a flaky psu... I know it sounds weird, but I've seen it happen. Without knowing what the exact model eMachine it is, it's hard to say, but I have seen many of the older models shipped with pretty crappy psu's.

One other thing you could try is booting from a Ubuntu live CD and see if it loads that properly. If it does, that pretty much eliminates hardware/heat as the issue.

[jwhazel]

Sounds like possibly a bad hard drive. F8 right before the loading screen like you would go into safe mode, select not to automatically reboot from errors down towards the bottom (I don't recall what it says verbatim). See if you are getting a BSOD and if so what it says.